Sewa News Stream

Christian Lawyers, which also goes by the name Legal Link, issued a press release this week featuring nine recommendations for the Special Investigations Committee, which President Julius Maada Bio hurriedly set up to look into the August 10 protests that left at least six police officers dead and scores of people unaccounted for.  Rashid Dumbuya, currently executive director of Legal Link, is also a former Commissioner for Human Rights in Sierra Leone, which was provided for in the Lome Peace Agreement of 1999, and was also recommended in the 2004 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report. The Human Rights Commission was established to protect and promote human rights in Sierra Leone. The commission is recognized as a national institution that fulfills the standards set by the UN Paris Principles governing such institutions. According to Dumbuya's biography on LinkedIn, he has worked with the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone and Human Rights Forum in Geneva. Christian Lawy

The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) was founded in1971 primarily to promote freedom of expression and the press, to seek the welfare and protection of its membership, and seek training and capacity-building opportunities for its membership. After 50 years, how does the current president, Ahmed Sahid Nasralla, plan to engage representatives from digitally literate countries that make up the international community? How does he expect them to strengthen a media landscape lagging behind current thinking or trends? A month ago, the Twitter feed of the SLAJ president was paying a lot of lip service to the launch of the Citizens Manifesto Report and the organization's support of initiatives that put citizens’ priorities at the top of the agenda for the 2023 elections in Sierra Leone. The Aug 10 protests, which later turned deadly, gave the SLAJ president a more urgent reason to speak about the economic base, public order, and protecting citizens and their freedoms.   "

Mohamed Sorie Forna and fourteen others were executed in Sierra Leone on July 19, 1975. I remember the date because my late father, driving us home, decided to go past Pademba Road. He was a Sierra Leone Daily Mail reporter in the 1950s. I have never forgotten the sight of bodies hanging on the high concrete wall towering over the prison. As I grew older and understood more of what I saw, I realized that there is reason developed countries choose not to display executed souls for all to see. By the time, Hindolo Tyre, a Fourah Bay College student president, was thrust into the role of leading a nationwide protest, which galvanized support from the labor unions, I was distracted by foreign movies like Network.  What I remember most about it was that before Howard Beale's sermons on the dehumanization of society, he asked viewers to shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows. Gosh, so many people I knew were silently scre